Welcome to the age of consumer HD video



YouTube’s video quality is spectacular.



Welcome to the age of HD video. Where’s yours?


Challenge to Rackspace: enable 15-min $100 Twitter businesses


Twitter's API chief speaks to LeWeb






Track Tweets with these keywords: [ ] <-Import a list of restaurant names, like Pasta Moon, plus a few other keywords, like "restaurant" or "eating."
Join these Tweets with APIs from these services [ ] <-Here's how the business will make money, we'll get people to reserve tables with OpenTable, which will get us a kickback.
Track sentiment using these phrases: [ ] <- Things like "service sucks" or "great meal" or "having fun" or other phrases you come up with.
Display on our directory [ ] <- Of course we'll have a directory, wouldn't we? Something like an app store where you can add other people's Twitter apps to your page, with revenue sharing, of course!



1. A clonable database of the Twitter firehose feed. After all, if you have a brainstorm about a new business you want to see results immediately upon starting up your business and you'd want to iterate it and see what the effects of changing various things are. In the example above, for instance, maybe if you are too strict with the geolocations you won't get any results, so you'll have to be looser about what your page will accept. You'll need to see the results on a few months' worth of data and you'll need to see your changes in real time. If you have to wait a few days to see results you'll lose interest and won't finish building a micro business like this.

2. Needs to be "cloud computing" simple. If you go to the Rackspace Cloud you can start up a new server in minutes just by entering in your credit card data. It's simple and anyone can do it. Same needs to be here.

3. Needs to have an upgrade path. If 100,000 of these simple businesses get created a few will get popular, like StockTwits has. That's when you will need to hire real developers to add some other features and build out iPhone apps and all the rest of the things a modern business needs now.

4. Needs to have Rackspace's famous service. Run into trouble, or need some help building something out, even at 2 a.m. on a Saturday? Gotta have the same business service Rackspace is famous for.


1. A decent service agreement that will let Rackspace host Twitter's firehose real time stream and clone it many, many times. Also, needs to have a way to keep a database of several months' worth of Tweets (I'd prefer to have a database of all Tweets, but I understand that Twitter doesn't want to enable shadow Twitters or real-time search engines).


3. If Twitter comes out with a "supertweet" (a new display surface/metadata payload that gets included with each Tweet) then we'll need access to that and we'll need a clean revenue-sharing agreement for any ads or affiliate networks placed on this supertweet.


Anyway, what do you think of this idea? Would you use it if it were built? What other kinds of things would you like to do with Twitter's real-time firehose feed?